C-notes for Brianna
Outpouring of donations in download suit
By Helen Kennedy for the NY Daily News.

Furious music lovers nationwide flooded 12-year-old Brianna LaHara of Manhattan with donations yesterday to help pay off her debt to the recording business.

From $3 pledges for the Help Brianna fund to $1,000 offers, hundreds of people wanted to help pay the $2,000 settlement between Brianna and the Recording Industry Association of America.
"The whole deal with going after the actual consumer - and the fact that it's a 12-year-old girl with a single mother who lives in the projects - well, these people have no decency," said Taylor Finley, a California film student who started the Help Brianna fund.

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Originally published on September 11, 2003
C-notes for Brianna
Outpouring of donations in download suit
By HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Furious music lovers nationwide flooded 12-year-old Brianna LaHara of Manhattan with donations yesterday to help pay off her debt to the recording business.

From $3 pledges for the Help Brianna fund to $1,000 offers, hundreds of people wanted to help pay the $2,000 settlement between Brianna and the Recording Industry Association of America.
"The whole deal with going after the actual consumer - and the fact that it's a 12-year-old girl with a single mother who lives in the projects - well, these people have no decency," said Taylor Finley, a California film student who started the Help Brianna fund.

An upper West Side honors student, Brianna was among 261 users of the KaZaA Internet file-sharing service hit by RIAA copyright violation lawsuits demanding as much as $150 million.

The girl said she thought downloading songs by Christina Aguilera and hundreds of other artists without paying a dime and offering to share the songs online was fine because she had bought a $29 premium version of KaZaA. Faced with unimaginable fines, Brianna's mom, Sylvia Torres, quickly agreed to a settlement offered by the RIAA.

Brianna's plight crystallized the outrage many feel about the RIAA's new get-tough policies after years of complaining about illegal Web downloaders and millions in lost sales but not taking legal action.
"I'm not spending another dime on CDs until they drop these lawsuits and apologize," said Charles Scott of Louisiana, who sent Brianna a $50 check.

Sympathetic face

Brianna - and 71-year-old Durwood Pickle of Texas, whose visiting grandkids illegally downloaded songs on his computer - put a sympathetic face on what the RIAA calls music pirates.

"The real hope here is that people will return to the record store," said Eric Garland, CEO of BigCampagne, which tracks peer-to-peer Internet trends. "The biggest question is whether singling out a handful of copyright infringers will invigorate business or drive file-sharing further underground, further out of reach."

But should "12-year-olds and grandmothers and grandfathers be subjected to the kind of terror campaign that this industry is waging?" asked Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a trade group representing six other file-sharing companies.

Acknowledging the fury, RIAA Vice President Matt Oppenheim said he was not surprised to see young and old alike caught in the snare.

"We know that there are a lot of young people who are using these services and we totally expected that we would end up targeting them," Oppenheim said. "As we have said from the beginning ... there is no free pass to engage in music piracy just because you haven't come of age."

With Derek Rose